ABSTRACT
I remember it as though it were yesterday-or today. On a bright, sunny morning in March, I met John Ogbu’s plane at National Airport in Washington, DC and drove him to an important policy meeting in the city. I was then a fledgling graduate student collecting ethnographic data in a high school in Washington, so these monthly meetings of senior scholars were off limits to me. Nonetheless, Ogbu’s frequent consulting trips gave me unparalleled opportunities to talk with him about my research project-but only if I sent a written draft for him to read on the plane before he arrived. He was, after all, a very busy man. On this particular day, we agreed to meet later for dinner to talk about my work on “Capital High.” That afternoon, as I sat at my assigned desk in the Library of Congress, I wondered how to explain to him why I had not written anything-again. Having a desk of my own at the Library of Congress (courtesy of my Congressional representative) gave me unlimited access to books and validated my standing as a scholar-to-be. Nothing could stand in sharper contrast to my childhood memories of chasing book mobiles and enduring the stern admonitions of wanna-be-librarians who did not believe I could read the books I requested and who viewed my repeated efforts to take more than the allotted number as an attempt to steal or cheat rather than a little girl’s insatiable desire to learn. So there I sat, wrestling with how to tell Ogbu that I had not yet begun to write, despite the massive data streams I had collected. I feared telling him that I had failed to do what he expected-again. I had no adequate explanation of my inability to put pen to paper; after all, I could talk about my work fluently enough. Ogbu had years of experience dealing with graduate students, so I knew that what I told him had to be something other than drylongso (ordinary). I was trying to invent any explanation to avoid facing the real one: that I was terrified, unable to write what I had discovered. I knew that, as soon as the truth came out, he would voice the refrain that he seemed to have invented just for me: “See-nee-shee-ah, you can do better than that.”
